


Returns

by Saeva



Category: Bourne (Movies)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Gen, introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-01-11
Updated: 2020-01-11
Packaged: 2021-02-27 04:41:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22211203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saeva/pseuds/Saeva
Summary: Jason Bourne isn't certain he wants the answers.Written many years ago for Yuletide.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 6
Collections: Yuletide 2008





	Returns

**Author's Note:**

  * For [LithiumDoll](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LithiumDoll/gifts).



'I wanted to thank you,' she'd said. 'For the tape.' For doing what had to be done, what we were too cowardly, too oblivious, too clean to do ourselves.

She wanted to thank him, he thought, and it'd drawn a cold wind into his chest as he considered it. For one last service to his country, the one that'd trained and used and betrayed him, the one that he still couldn't shake even after two years and a complete loss of memory.

She wanted to tell him something that would draw him back in. A name, one that glittered on the edge of his awareness, a misplaced shadow in an inconspicuous room that drew his fingers tight around the trigger. The trigger in his head now, but it hadn't set off any shots, any bombs, any sudden revelations.

The name 'David Webb' categorized itself in his head, at the top of the list of things he now knew about himself - if Landy wasn't lying but she wasn't that good an actress, even from a scope - but like the names that sometimes swirled up in his brain in his dreams, breaking surface far enough that when he woke up he had time to jot them down and hope more would come, it faded away from his vision without revealing anything he needed to know.

His name was David Webb.

He'd told the girl, the Neski girl as she sat trembling before him, her eyes darting back again to the coat pocket that held his gun, then sliding away slowly, sometimes towards his face, sometimes towards his bloody hands, that if it was him he'd want to know. He'd want to know the truth about what had happened to him, about what had forced him into the situations he was enacting.

He'd told Nicky, as he'd thrust her against the underground pillar, her back connecting with an unforgiving thud, that he'd watched Marie die. Then he'd taken her to a backroom and put a gun to her head and demanded answers. Nicky knew everything there was to know about Jason Bourne, she even knew that he'd watched Marie die, but she hadn't known anything about David Webb.

Neither had he. He still knew nothing except that David Webb was a soldier, an agent, a man with a past but without a future. Except that David Webb had killed a couple in a hotel room in Berlin, orphaning their daughter. Except that David Webb had botched a mission and ended up with amnesia, amnesia that led him back to Jason Bourne.

His name was David Webb, but he was Jason Bourne. He'd gone too far to go back to it, if there was anything to go back to. Landy hadn't understood that, that she'd been dangling the wrong carrot. He wanted answers, he wanted the truth, but he had enough truth to last a lifetime and what he wanted most of all was to be left alone. She'd been using the wrong stick. He wasn't ready for the truth.

* * *

When he dreamed of Marie he dreamed of India. He dreamed of the way she'd curled up on the beach in the humidity and starlight, a ratty blanket from when they'd been in Taiwan or New Zealand before that, the one she hadn't been willing to leave behind, tugged tight around her shoulders as she watched the waves. Of the way she smiled at him, her teeth gleaming in the reflection of the moon against the ocean. Of the way her shoulders had drawn together coolly when he sat down next to her but the blanket opened up for him as well.

He dreamed of her laugh and of her in the kitchen, throwing things together in her cooking with the same intuitiveness he used to watch people. Of her callused, sand burned hands smooth against his sweat soaked skin in the night, the light cutting through the half curtains they used as cover, illuminating her hair and his hands and them together in the bed.

He dreamed of the nightmares. Of waking up in water, of his fingers around her throat in the moment before consciousness, of the way she forgave him. Of screaming, his mouth dry and raw and her words soft and casual. Of the way she'd hold him, her fingers raking through the short strands of his hair as he tried to burn the images out of his mind by sheer will alone.

He dreamed of India but he never dreamed of her death. He never remembered it when he woke up if he did. Some things even his mind shied away from, some things even he knew better than to poke at like a festering wound. Not many, but some.

Treadstone, the Neski case, Landy, those were things his mind wouldn't give up, things that'd even when he wasn't thinking about them, even when he'd shut them away, locked into the vault he'd constructed in his mind, they came up. Landy's words, that ate at him.

'David Webb,' she'd said, her voice hesitant, soft, as if it was a secret she wasn't sure should be spoken aloud. The name was an admission of what they'd done to him, what they'd taken from him, a guilty plea. A man they had murdered. 'That's your real name.'

David Webb, born April 15th 1971 in Nixa, Missouri.

Those were the words that he had heard, the ones he memorized the sounds of, but they were as empty as his dreams. Like Marie's last breath his mind shied away from them relentlessly, through the long months of fall and winter.

In the spring he returned to India, to the last place he had dared to think of as home in his half-asleep thoughts, and then he had dreamed of her eyes, wide open in death, her hair slashing around her head like an angry halo as she dropped away from him. He dreamed of one final, drowning accusation and her voice. He dreamed of her, as she was, and he surfaced with the memories of his dreams, holding onto her words, the words about a man she thought he was better than to be.

A week later CIA Director Pamela Landy walked out of a small market shop in the Chinatown district of New York city proper and he was waiting. He'd been waiting for a long time. He'd been waiting his whole life, as he remembered it. But he was ready to remember more.


End file.
